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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25365403">arm in arm in arm</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/biblionerd07/pseuds/biblionerd07'>biblionerd07</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Leverage</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Developing Relationship, Established Relationship, F/M, Feelings Realization, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Introspection, Metaphors, Multi, Past Abuse, Polyamory</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 09:08:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,934</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25365403</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/biblionerd07/pseuds/biblionerd07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Eliot always catches Parker when she jumps out of windows, even though they both know she'd be fine on her own. She's starting to think that means something.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alec Hardison &amp; Parker &amp; Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison/Parker, Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>72</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>359</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>arm in arm in arm</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>            “Incoming, Parker,” Nate warns. Parker can’t get out the door with whoever’s coming at her coming in. Luckily, it’s not a huge problem for her.</p><p>        	“Window,” she says. Four years ago, she wouldn’t know that she needs to let them know she’s heading for the window. She’d just do it. But they’re a team, and they worry if they don’t know explicitly that she has an exit.</p><p>        	“Wait,” Nate says.</p><p>        	“Now hold up, woman, you’re on the sixth floor,” Hardison says. They always get so panicked when she chooses the window.</p><p>        	“Gimme a second,” Eliot requests, sounding like he’s already running. Parker counts to three, because it turns out <em>gimme a second</em> doesn’t literally mean one second. Then she jumps out the window. Eliot’s there. He grunts and braces himself to catch her.</p><p>        	“Dammit, Parker, your knee’s barely even healed,” he snaps, grumpy about it. He always gets grumpy when she jumps out the window without anything but him to break her fall. But he never actually gets mad at her or tells her to stop. He does kind of have a good point about her knee. It’s only been a month and a half since the doctor cleared her for “athletics” without knowing what that might entail for Parker. She notices Eliot doesn’t mention his own, even fresher injuries, the bullet wounds he got while they were in D.C. He never mentions his own injuries. </p><p>She doesn’t really know why Eliot gets so huffy about catching her, though. She could go out the window without him down there to catch her. She knows he knows that. Everyone knows that. But he always comes to the window anyway.</p><p>        	“Oh,” she says, because that kind of feels like it means something. She’s not sure what, though.</p><p>        	“What?” Eliot asks, grumpiness making way a little bit for concern. That’s another something, the way he flips that switch whenever he thinks she might actually need him. He glances around, in case she noticed something he didn’t, and then he runs his eyes up and down her body to make sure she didn’t hurt herself. That means something, too, but she can’t explain it.</p><p>        	They’re still in the middle of the job, and Sophie is talking overly loudly to give them a hint about what the mark’s going to do next, so she just shakes her head and says, “Let’s go.”</p><p>        	Eliot raises his eyebrows a little, but he follows her when she takes off running. It’s another something, she thinks. She needs time to sort through it.</p><p> </p><p>        	“You gonna tell me what’s going on in your head?” Hardison asks mildly when they wake up the next morning and she’s still sorting through the somethings.</p><p>        	“Not yet,” Parker says easily. She doesn’t have to worry about him being mad. He never gets mad or impatient with her. He gets impatient with his computers sometimes, and <em>very</em> impatient with food, but never with her.</p><p>        	“Alright.” He’s unbothered. “You let me know if you need me to help.”</p><p>        	That’s always Hardison’s approach with her. He waits and he helps and he doesn’t push. Except when her knee was hurt and he pushed her to take her pain pills, but that doesn’t count for what she’s thinking. She’s thinking about the big ways he doesn’t push. He knew she didn’t know how to have a relationship. She’d grown up so far removed from all of that. Humanity, she says sometimes, but he doesn’t really like when she distances herself from being a person.</p><p>        	Parker always noticed things, of course. She saw people her own age coupling off and she watched TV sometimes, through someone’s window or at a store, so she knew that people seemed to spend the majority of their lives worrying about dating and sex and significant others. She had sex a few times; sometimes she wanted to and sometimes she didn’t. She knows Alec doesn’t call it sex when it was the times she didn’t want to. His lips press together and his nostrils flare but he isn’t mad at her. He’s mad at her life or he’s mad at the people who had sex with her when she didn’t want to have sex. She knows the times she had sex when she didn’t want to affected her having sex now, and the relationship stuff. He knows it, too, and that’s part of why he doesn’t push. The other part is because that’s how Hardison is.</p><p>        	He never wants to have sex if she doesn’t want to. Well, she amends in her head, she can tell he still <em>wants</em> to, in that he’s still thinking about sex and hard and all that. But he backs all the way off, and he doesn’t get mad, and he tells her it absolutely does not hurt him when she goes weeks at a time without even remembering about sex.</p><p>        	“You’re what’s important,” he always tells her, and it’s a nice feeling, but a bit overwhelming sometimes. She went from no one caring at all what her life was like to three people caring a lot and one person caring <em>so much</em>. It’s a big change.</p><p>        	Sometimes Parker thinks of herself as hiding behind a locked door. Maybe not hiding, but living behind a locked door. With a motion sensor in front of it. And a security gate that’s been welded shut. That’s how she lived her entire life—safe but alone.</p><p>But then she joined a team. The whole team got through the welded door, Hardison and Eliot and Sophie and Nate each taking a turn hacking through it with…whatever gets through a welded door without sneaking through a vent. Eliot would know. And then they beat the motion sensor. Hardison figured out how to turn it off, like he always does.</p><p>And that just left the locked door. They would take turns knocking on it to see if she wanted to come out, but it was Hardison who sat down outside it and waited for her to give him the key. Or unlock it herself? Maybe open the door? She’s not the best at metaphors.</p><p>        	The point of the metaphor is, she thinks Hardison is the only person she can really love like that, because of how he waits for her and understands her. And she wouldn’t have been ready to love Hardison if she hadn’t joined a team. She’d always cared about people, kind of, in an abstract kind of way; she never liked seeing kids go hungry or get hurt, especially, because she knew what it felt like. But she’d never been one to help other people much. She always figured she was too busy taking care of herself to worry about anyone else.</p><p>        	And then she joined a team. And not only were they helping strangers, they were caring about each other. She had to learn how to have someone’s back and let someone have hers. And she started <em>wanting</em> to help other people more. When they did that job with the experiment taking in homeless vets, she’d given them blankets and jackets to get the button cameras in. But more than that, she’d wanted them to be warm, even though she didn’t know them at all.</p><p>        	She’d looked at those men and she’d thought of Eliot, about how his life could’ve gone differently and he could’ve been one of them. She’d hated that thought. She knows Eliot’s lived through bad things, but she never wants to think about him sleeping in the cold and not having enough to eat. It’s comforting to know it won’t happen to him. It can’t now—they’re a team. They won’t let anything like that happen to him, and he won’t leave them.</p><p>        	The point of all this, she thinks to herself, is that it’s normal for Eliot to take care of her. Because they’re a team. And he helped, as part of the team, and as himself because that’s what Eliot does, to help her to learn how to be a person. With emotions and everything.</p><p>        	He catches her under windows because it’s his job. But is that his job? His job is to make sure no guards come around the corner and catch her at the window. His job is to find her and get her out if she gets trapped inside somewhere. Is it part of his job to stand under a window and catch her, or is that just Eliot?</p><p>        	“Does Eliot catch me because it’s his job?” She asks Hardison.</p><p>        	She watches him catching up to her brain and remembers she didn’t tell him all the first parts of her thought process. He gets what she means, though. He always does. Or most of the time, anyway. Sometimes he needs a little more explanation, but she never has to spell out every single thing for him. He’s a genius and he knows her really well, so he can usually put it together on his own.</p><p>“Yeah,” Hardison says. “I think it’s his job. Probably not the strict definition of a hitter, but that’s definitely part of Eliot’s version of his job.”</p><p>        	“Okay,” she says, and she thinks she might be a little disappointed. Maybe she wanted to feel special. Or like Eliot thinks she’s special.</p><p>        	“I think Eliot would catch you even if it wasn’t his job, though,” Hardison goes on.</p><p>Sometimes it feels spooky to be so understood, like maybe Hardison’s earpieces can actually read her thoughts. That’s silly, though. She doesn’t even have the earpiece in right now. And anyway, Hardison wouldn’t do that. He goes on a rant about privacy in technology at least once a week.</p><p>        	“Because he’s Eliot,” Parker checks.</p><p>        	Hardison kind of shrugs against the bed. “Yeah. And because you’re you.”</p><p>        	“Does Eliot think I’m special?” Parker asks.</p><p>        	“Definitely,” Hardison says without hesitation. “Who doesn’t?”</p><p>        	That’s one of those questions she doesn’t actually need to answer. He’s being nice to her. She knows a lot of people who don’t think she’s special, or at least not special in a good way. But Hardison thinks she’s special in a good way, and sometimes Nate and Sophie do, and now he’s saying Eliot does, too.</p><p>        	“Okay, I’m going back to thinking instead of talking,” she tells Hardison, because he likes to get a warning about that kind of thing.</p><p>        	“No problem,” he says, rolling out of the bed. “I need to make sure Nate’s blow up really blew up and went viral.”</p><p>        	She doesn’t spend too long sorting through her feelings after that. It’s not that she figures it out. It’s just that she thinks she might need some more information. She’d like to know why she’s feeling the sudden need to untangle all these emotions, but she doesn’t know that, and unfortunately, she doesn’t think anyone else can give her that information. That’s not something she can read off someone else.</p><p>        	Sometimes, she’s learned, even her own feelings just need some time to solidify. It’s so annoying. Parker can be patient in exactly one situation: when she’s stealing. She can lie in an air vent for two days to make sure she’s got guard rotations and crowd patterns down. She can hide in an elevator shaft as long as it takes for the lights to go out. But Parker has a lot of trouble being patient with anything else. It’s amazing to her that Hardison is so patient with her. She’s afraid she wouldn’t return the favor if he needed it. Luckily, he hasn’t so far, so she hasn’t had to find out.</p><p>        	They wrap up the job a few nights later, and Sophie and Nate pretend they’re making plans to go out for dinner. Parker rolls her eyes. “Why are you making a cover story?” She asks, a little curious. She doesn’t know why Nate and Sophie need to lie about it. They all know they’re sleeping together, and it’s not like they’re trying to gently get out of something.</p><p>        	“What do you mean?” Sophie asks.</p><p>        	“We all know you’re just going back to Nate’s place to have sex,” Parker says. “Why don’t you just say that?”</p><p>        	“It’s not exactly polite to make plans to have sex in front of other people,” Sophie explains.</p><p>        	“It isn’t?” That’s definitely news to Parker. She looks at Hardison. “I guess we haven’t been polite.”</p><p>        	“I’ll say,” Eliot mutters. That gives her a feeling somewhere in her stomach. She looks over at him, worried he’s upset they’ve talked about sex in front of him. But he’s talked about sex in front of them, too, so that doesn’t seem fair.</p><p>        	He sees her looking and winks. She relaxes. Eliot’s doing his funny grumpy act. The grumpiness isn’t exactly an act, but he exaggerates it sometimes just to be funny. She likes it.</p><p>        	Nate and Sophie split off, and Parker chirps out, “Have fun having sex!” It makes Hardison and Eliot both laugh, so she doesn’t really care if it’s not polite. She likes when they’re both laughing. Especially when they’re laughing with each other and joking back and forth. It makes her shoulders relax.</p><p>        	“What are we watching tonight?” Eliot asks Hardison while they head back to the apartment over the Brewpub. That’s usually where the three of them convene after cases while Sophie and Nate are off having sex.</p><p>        	“Patience, grasshopper,” Hardison says. Eliot wrinkles his nose and rolls his eyes. He hates when Hardison tries to sound like a ninja master. But the kind of hate where he actually kind of likes it and thinks it’s funny.</p><p>        	Interactions between Hardison and Eliot can be exhausting to parse. But the good kind of exhausting, like a new base jump or a long day of acro training. She doesn’t always catch all the little meanings between them, but every day she notices more. She likes that it means she’s learning more about each of them.</p><p>        	She doesn’t last long on the couch for the movie. She never really does. Sitting still is boring if she’s not casing a place. She usually likes the movies Hardison picks, but she has to watch them in shorter increments. Unless he lets her pick a Christmas movie, but Eliot said not until after Halloween. First he said not until after Thanksgiving, but they compromised since there aren’t really a lot of Thanksgiving movies to fill the gap.</p><p>        	She’s distracted tonight. She’s sitting in the middle, Hardison on one side and Eliot on the other, and her feelings are jumbling up again. She keeps glancing between Hardison and Eliot and there’s a feeling between her chest and her throat, a rising, climbing kind of feeling. She doesn’t know what it means.</p><p>        	“Are you gonna want more popcorn before you go?” Eliot asks. “Should I make more?” Parker didn’t say anything about leaving, but he knew she would, and he wants to make sure she gets popcorn before she goes. The rising, climbing feeling gets higher. <em>It means something</em>. She’s starting to get frustrated, and there’s only one cure for that.</p><p>        	“No,” she says. “I’m going to go climb right now.”</p><p>        	Hardison looks over for a check-in. Sometimes going to climb means she has bad feelings. Sometimes going to climb means she’s really happy. Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything and she just wants to climb. She doesn’t think her feelings right now are bad. They’re just confusing.</p><p>        	She shrugs at him so he’ll know she feels okay but doesn’t know if it’ll be bad later. He nods and then tips his head to the side to mean she can talk to him about it if she wants to. She nods back and then looks over at Eliot. He raises his eyebrows to ask if she’s okay and she nods at him, too.</p><p>        	There’s so much talking that can happen without words, just with faces and bodies. That’s something Parker had to learn. She didn’t look at a lot of people’s faces and bodies when she was younger, so apparently she missed out on learning this kind of stuff. She’s learning now, though, and she thinks she’s learning pretty fast.</p><p>        	She can understand Hardison’s nonverbal talking about 90% of the time. That’s the highest of anyone. It’s because she’s spent the most time with him, and the most time studying him. Everyone else is a little harder to understand when they don’t use words.</p><p>        	Eliot is the second-easiest to understand after Hardison. She gets him right about 85% of the time. She thinks the 5% discrepancy probably has something to do with the way Eliot is better at guarding his face and his emotions. Hardison is terrible at it and they all know it. Eliot is really good at it, but he usually lets himself relax around them. He lets her understand his non-talking talking. It’s one of the ways he’s nice to her in a way he isn’t nice to anyone else.</p><p>        	“Take your rigging, just in case,” Eliot calls out when she’s halfway to the window. “I’m not gonna be there for you to fall all over.” He’s acting kind of grumpy about it again, but since Parker can understand his other meaning 85% of the time, she knows that this means <em>be safe</em>.</p><p>        	<em>It means something</em>. She holds in a growl of frustration. What does it mean? She doesn’t know. But she detours to Eliot’s room—the spare bedroom, technically, but it’s the one Eliot sleeps in when he stays over because it’s late or because a mark threatened to kill Hardison or because they stopped a virus from taking over the world and he got shot twice. He sleeps there more nights than he doesn’t at this point, so Parker and Hardison just call it Eliot’s room. Parker gets her rig and holds it up. Hardison gives her a thumb’s up and Eliot nods his okay.</p><p>        	They’re both engrossed in the movie, which is weird because it’s boring. Maybe it wouldn’t be so boring if she’d paid any attention and knew what was happening, but maybe not. If Hardison and Eliot both like it, it’s probably just actually boring. She comes around the couch and gives Hardison a kiss goodbye. He likes kisses goodbye and hello and good morning and good night. And he likes just because kisses, too. She’d never had all those kisses before, but she agrees with him now that she’s experienced them all. They’re nice.</p><p>        	He especially likes kisses before she leaves to climb, because even with bad feelings, a kiss before she climbs means <em>I’m okay </em>and<em> I’ll come home</em>. She likes reminding him of that. Then she goes to the other side of the couch and gives Eliot a kiss, too, because he should know she’s okay and she’s coming home, too. She heads to the window and leaves.</p><p>        	She pauses on a fire escape three buildings over and realizes she’s never kissed Eliot before. That might be a problem. She’s probably not supposed to kiss Eliot. In movies, people who kiss more than one person in the same night are usually not good people. Eliot kisses lots of people, but never two in the same night. Or, she reflects, not that she’s seen. There are other movies where people definitely kiss two people at once, but those aren’t movies Eliot will watch with them. Sophie doesn’t go on dates or kiss other people now that she’s with Nate. That’s not what people are supposed to do when they’re in a relationship. Parker got it wrong again.</p><p>        	She retraces her steps and pulls herself back in the window. “Was that wrong?” She asks.</p><p>        	They both turn to look at her. Apparently they’d gone back to watching the movie, so maybe it wasn’t a big deal.</p><p>        	“What?” Hardison asks.</p><p>        	“I kissed Eliot,” she says. “Was that bad?”</p><p>        	They both blink at her. Hardison looks over at Eliot, who looks surprised. “Oh,” Eliot says. “You did.” They didn’t seem to even notice. She wonders if that says something about her kissing abilities, but she throws that thought away pretty quickly. She’s kissed Hardison a lot, and he likes her kissing abilities, so she knows she’s not bad at it.</p><p>        	“Was that bad?” Parker repeats, more urgent this time. She needs an answer. Eliot looks over at Hardison, really fast, without moving any part of his body but his eyes. That usually means he’s worried about something.</p><p>        	“Not from where I’m sitting,” Hardison says, voice casual but body really, really tense.</p><p>        	“Your body looks really tense,” Parker counters.</p><p>        	“It does,” Eliot agrees.</p><p>        	“I—can a man process?” Hardison asks. “I mean, goddamn.”</p><p>        	“Good process or bad process?” Parker checks. “I’m sorry if it was wrong.” She looks over at Eliot. “Sorry if you didn’t want me to kiss you.”</p><p>        	Eliot swallows. “I didn’t—not want to you to kiss me.”</p><p>        	Now Hardison looks over at Eliot really fast, but he turns his whole body to do it. “Oh?”</p><p>        	“I…” Eliot licks his lips. “I mean, I don’t think I’m reading this wrong…? For both of you?”</p><p>        	“No, no,” Hardison says quickly. “I mean—yeah, man.”</p><p>        	They’re looking at each other, both kind of breathless, and Parker wrinkles her nose. Their 90% and 85% just went right out the window, because she didn’t understand <em>any</em> of that. “What?” She asks.</p><p>        	“Babe,” Hardison says. “Do you want to keep kissing Eliot?”</p><p>        	This time, Eliot looks at her really fast without moving his body. He looks a little nervous. Parker considers. Eliot is very pretty, but that’s never really mattered to her very much when it comes to kissing someone. Mostly, she just kissed someone because they were going to have sex, or because it was Hardison. Hardison is also pretty, but he was pretty before she started kissing him.</p><p>        	She doesn’t feel the same way for Eliot the way she does for Hardison. But she thinks she might feel <em>as much</em> for Eliot as she does for Hardison. It just feels different. Hardison was a slow descent, lowering herself little by little to where he was because she knew she could, because she knew he was waiting and she’d have a soft place to land.</p><p>        	But Eliot is more like a climb. <em>That’s</em> the feeling in her chest and her throat. A climb to heights unknown. She didn’t even know what was up there, so she didn’t know if she wanted anything at the top. But getting to the top is maybe kissing Eliot, and all the relationship stuff that goes along with it.</p><p>        	Now that she’s gotten there, Parker realizes yes, she does want that. “Yeah,” she says out loud. “Is that allowed? I thought you were supposed to pick one person. And I already picked you.”</p><p>That makes her immediately feel bad, though. Thinking about not kissing Eliot and not having Eliot here all the time, just like Hardison is, makes her feel bad.</p><p>“You don’t have to pick just one,” Hardison says. “Not if everyone agrees.”</p><p>There’s a beat of silence while they all contemplate that. “Well?” Parker asks impatiently. “Does everyone agree?” She and Hardison both look at Eliot.</p><p>“Uh…” Eliot sounds breathless, like he just ran up two flights of stairs to take out some armed thug before he could get to Parker and Hardison.</p><p>A lot of things Parker noticed without knowing quite what they meant suddenly crystalize in her brain, like when everything clicks and she understands Nate’s whole plan. She thinks Eliot does agree. She thinks Eliot loves them the way Hardison loves her and she loves Hardison. And, she realizes, the way they both love Eliot. She didn’t even notice she was falling in love with Eliot. She’d been so very aware of it with Hardison. Maybe because it was the first time she’d ever done it. She’s always more careful on the first attempt at a new thing.</p><p>She wonders when it happened with Eliot. Maybe when he was making her food with feelings because she needed help learning to enjoy things. Maybe all those times he’s caught her out of windows and came around a corner right at the right time to rescue her. Maybe when he let her poke at his bruises or offered to kill that psychic guy. Maybe when he was talking Nate off ledges or telling Sophie exactly how to get away from a bomb. Maybe when she watched him do his special handshake with Hardison and the two of them sat close enough to touch on the couch or in the car or on the floor. Maybe when his eyes shined and he asked her not to ask what he’d done because he’d tell her and she wanted to cry and take him away from all the bad stuff. Maybe when he was steadying Hardison so she could climb over him to disarm the pressure plate.</p><p>Wow. She probably should’ve noticed all this sooner. She thinks she and Hardison and Eliot have all been in love with each other for a long time. She loves Hardison, and she and Hardison are good, but suddenly she realizes they’re even better when Eliot’s with them. They should’ve added kissing and relationship stuff with Eliot into the mix a long time ago.</p><p>Then she thinks about not knowing relationship stuff. Eliot does know about relationship stuff, but he’s also had bad relationship stuff before, and he doesn’t always think he’s a good guy. That makes it harder to jump into the relationship stuff. She knows that firsthand. Parker thinks of Hardison, patiently waiting for her, and she sighs a little. This could suck if Eliot doesn’t answer the way she wants him to, but he deserves for her to say it.</p><p>“You don’t have to say yes,” she tells Eliot dutifully. “You wouldn’t have to say yes at all, I mean. But you can say yes if you want but also you can take time. If you need it.”</p><p>“I don’t need time,” Eliot says. “I agree.”</p><p>Parker sighs again, this time in relief. “I’m so glad, because I am <em>not</em> patient.”</p><p>“We’re very aware,” Hardison promises. “You still gonna go climb, or can we all kiss a little more right now?”</p><p>Parker starts to take an internal inventory, but then she notices how Hardison and Eliot are looking at each other and she says, “I’m going to think for a second, but you two should kiss while I do that.”</p><p>They don’t waste another second. It’s a good thing their couch is big and very stable, because they’re both pretty heavy and they’re suddenly moving very fast on that couch. Oh, that’s very interesting. Parker can barely even take her internal inventory because she’s watching them.</p><p>“I don’t need to climb anymore,” she announces, and she doesn’t. Her need to climb was because she couldn’t figure out the tangle of feelings, but she gets it now. She was wanting Eliot. Now they have him. It seems a little silly to waste the immediate aftermath of that to take the time to go climb. “Oh!” Parker says. “This is perfect! Now when I’m not in the mood for sex, you have each other. And then I’ll have sex with both of you when I want to.” She beams. Another way they work best with Eliot with them.</p><p>Hardison makes a strangled noise that means he’s really, really turned on but trying to contain himself in case she’s not ready right now. “That is—yeah,” he says. “That’s really perfect, babe.”</p><p>“Do you want to have sex with both of us right now?” Eliot asks. Hardison nods very vigorously.</p><p>“I don’t know,” Parker admits. “But I want to kiss both of you. And I definitely want to watch you two. I like that way more than this boring movie.”</p><p>“Boring—?” Hardison starts to say.</p><p>“Man, shut up,” Eliot says. “Who cares about the movie? Come on!”</p><p>They get back to kissing, and Parker settles herself in the middle of them, where she can be touching both of them. It’s very, very nice, and she’s glad all her feelings finally untangled themselves. Now she thinks her body might like to tangle instead.</p><p> </p><p>A few hours later, squished between the two of them in bed as they all fall asleep together, Parker starts laughing. Eliot makes a little noise like he’s considering being offended. “Laughing? Really?” He asks.</p><p>“Hardison is the soft place to land but you’re the one who always catches me,” she explains, still laughing. “It’s funny! I think that’s irony.”</p><p>“What?” Eliot asks, mystified.</p><p>Hardison says, “She’s been thinking about all this since you caught her after that job the other day. I’m guessing it has something to do with that. Parker, you need contribution to this conversation?”</p><p>“No,” she says, still laughing. She snuggles in closer to both of them, making sure Hardison’s arm that’s wrapped around her reaches all the way over to Eliot, too. “I think I just need this.”</p><p>She can hear a smile in Hardison’s voice when he says, “Aw.”</p><p>Eliot says, “Amen.” That’s nice. They all agree. Then Eliot says, “Now be quiet and go to sleep.”</p><p>He’s still being grumpy even though they’re all really happy right now. That’s actually nice, though. Parker likes knowing some things will stay the same. And one thing she knows for sure right now is that these two beside her is always going to be a constant. She hasn’t had a lot of good constants, but she knows enough about life and herself and relationships to know she’s going to hold onto this one as hard as she can.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>
  <a href="http://biblionerd07.tumblr.com">my tumblr</a>
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